You are kidding, right? A chip? It doesn't work, it has been proven time and again not to work. How long are we going to keep ****ing around with this? The only way you can ensure that your app isn't pirated, is to not make it available at all. Is that a viable solution? No, but it is FAR more realistic than your approach, and it would eliminate piracy 100%. Developers should consider themselves to be lucky to even get a 'donation'. I look at some of the apps out there and wonder how the hell they were able to even swindle 10 downloads- they are literally that crappy. Just because you create something doesn't mean it inherently has value. Spend more time developing your apps, pay attention to what your fans like, produce more of it. Grow your company that way. I thought this was common sense, but apparently not. Todays method seems to be to produce something that people aren't buying and then blame it on piracy. It is convenient, I admit, but if you are losing sales to pirates, your problem isn't piracy, it is crappy business practices. There, I said it. As a final note, I think that Mobile1Up has a viable solution. Simply reporting, but not disabling the app. I can't tell you how many times I've bought something and then not have it work for one reason or another. When I switch phones in the next year, MY APPS BETTER WORK goddam it.
I have to agree with Flickitty. Just look at the games currently advertised on the toucharcade banners: Fumbers - tagline: "it's not completely c***!", so its not far from it then. Doodle Bomb, another ripoff of the Doodle Jump name, there is Doodle everything now! Ghosts vs Zombies, a complete ripoff the Plants vs Zombies names, and we have enough tower defense style games already!! I could say more, but the point is unoriginality and bad games just clones of other games or riding on the sucess by using part of its name in the title. It has nothing to do with piracy, since none of these games will sell well anyway.
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous argument. Every digital product is pirated, both the incredibly good, and the atrociously poor. The pirates I've known on a personal level have never discriminated on whether they disagree with the company or whatever, they just download what they like. And the general rule always seems to be, whether for music piracy, movie piracy, or software piracy: either they are an honest customer and illegally download nothing, or they are a pirate and illegally download everything. The middle road is very barren.
Having spent a good many years on the other side of the fence when I was a teenager, I can say that just about any protection scheme can be reversed by someone with enough determination, knowledge and spare time. The good news is that by carefully constructing your protection from the ground up rather than adding it in right at the end can lead to mechanisms that are very frustrating to remove. Even someone with sufficient knowledge and determination may simply be put off by the sheer volume of work required. One of my most prolific cracks took me over a week and even stumped the big dogs over at Fairlight because it used an intelligent HW dongle that would decrypt blocks of data which would result in code that the app would then execute. It took a lot of work to patch that app, and they used the dongle pervasively throughout because they had the foresight to design it in from the ground up. Unfortunately for them I had lots of time on my hands and was challenged by a friend who stated that "nobody can crack this". In post-analysis I also realized that if they had just made a few minor changes to how they were using the dongle they would have effectively stumped me. Similarly, there are some really good schemes out there that have yet to be successfully reversed because they utilize very sophisticated layered protection. It's not always about being super smart.. sometimes it's enough to make it a complete pain in the ass by bombarding it with a large number of dependent checks and non-obvious failure points. On the iPhone I think even some really simple mechanisms are good enough to prevent your app from instantly being pirated. We put some simple checks into our latest game, and so far (knock on wood) it has not been cracked but we also realize that what we have is fairly trivial to get around in the hands of anyone with a passing knowledge of ARM. That being said, with 170k apps out there, unless the app becomes incredibly popular it will likely remain under the radar and as long as we can prevent the script kiddies and auto-cracking apps from circumventing the protection, we'll be in good shape. One bit of advice I can give: If you do something obvious when the app fails.. eg. bring up a dialog, the easiest way to reverse this is to work backwards. Find the dialog, figures out what triggers it, and then NOP out the offending code. If you can use the check to generate a value that the app relies on for correct behavior somewhere else, you'll make it much harder to find the check. BTW, as an FYI, Apple's approval team tests on encrypted binaries... this is good news if you're using that as part of your check.
My statement wasn't about whether the pirates agree with the company or not, it is completely irrelevant. My point is that from a business standpoint, it is BAD business to focus your attention on pirates, rather than modifying your business model to sell your product. I've completely removed pirates from the equation, and placed the responsibility solely on the developer. There are plenty of developers that sell sufficient units. The industry has not collapsed, in fact it has grown steadily year after year.
This is the key point. Implement some simple protection to stop the one-click-crack and you've covered 99% of the cases. Beyond that takes a skilled cracker, and you have to be pretty visible before it's worth their time.
Which means nothing. Zero success in thwarting pirates multiplied by a magnitude of 10,000 still equals zero. Can you specifically point me to a platform that has not been cracked? Software, hardware or otherwise? For the most part, it seems that the sole purpose of DRM and protection is to piss off the valid customers, in an attempt to cause them to rally together against pirates. For what purpose, a near ZERO increase in sales? That is a brilliant plan.
That just means it takes 10 days for them to crack instead of 1. Then they write a script that handles it automatically. The end result is still the same.
There are a few software packages that were never cracked due to them requiring a USB dongle that included an important portion of the code. I could also point to videogame consoles; while not necessarily being impossible to crack, they're extremely difficult for the casual user to do, and often require hardware modifications such as modchips. Piracy is extremely low on consoles compared to the PC videogame market, and even the App store market. Simply because the hardware is locked just that extra bit tighter.
The console market also allows people to RENT games for fairly cheap, and you can even swap/share games with your friends for a week, or resell your game. While the hardware is indeed locked up (for the average user), the methods of protection are at least tolerable for the platform. The PC market is completely intolerable, and always has been since I started playing PC games back in '91. The USB dongles are a joke. I have 2 USB ports, and I am not about to plug one up with a goddam dongle. No, a USB hub is not an option, I have a MacBook for the purpose of being mobile. I have a completely valid and legally licensed version of 3D Studio Max, and it required a Parallel dongle. My laptops haven't had a parallel port since the late 90's. Yeah, I cracked my legally bought software, if they want to bitch about it I can still show them the original box, all documentation, disks and serial numbers.
That stopped being true sometime around the release of the Dreamcast. (Most pirated console ever, BTW.) PS2, PS1, Gamecube, and the lot followed. The Wii even has a so-called "Homebrew Channel" which can be installed fairly easily that allows ISOs to be played from an SD Card. In other words, your information is bad. Which seems to be an unfortunate trend with your posts. You might want to try a more conversational tone rather than attempting to be an authority on things you're unfamiliar with.
As a developer of a game that's not completely crap I'm obviously not too happy about software piracy. I don't really think it's something it's worth spending too much time trying to prevent though, as it seems to me a lot of pirates just takes this as a challenge and that they always manage to break any kind of protection eventually. So I don't let piracy as a whole bother me all that much. What does worry me though is the attitude a lot of young people have towards piracy. Let me elaborate: When I was in my teens 8-bit was state of the art and my collection of C-64 games was not 100% *ahem* official... I did buy quite a lot of games though, financed by saving up my allowance and delivering the paper. And, while I was benefiting from the illegal acts of pirated software I alway knew what I was doing was wrong, as did all my friends. We couldn't afford to buy all the games we wanted though, and our greed certainly got the better of us. However, when we eventually grew up and started to make real money, we didn't keep on pirating software, because we always had the mindset that it was wrong even though it was certainly convenient. I am really worried about the future for anyone selling products based on intellectual property. I might be completely wrong but my impression is that almost every teenager on the planet seem to think that pirating is not only OK, but something that should be allowed by law(!) So, while I don't think it is worth it trying to beat the pirates with clever software, I do believe it is extremely important to tell people about the problem. Real people are loosing real money, and on a platform like iPhone it seems even worse. After all the majority of us iPhone developers are regular geeks investing time and money trying to generate some kind of income from making apps for people's phones. The sales-price hardly goes above $4, most titles selling for $1, but still people are pirating our apps, I find this quite unbelievable. It actually saddens me that developers are losing money and people's complete indifference towards the matter...
Yeah, except the stats disagree. In the case of music, at least, the pirates are actually also the biggest spenders.
Do you have any statistics of cracked console owners? As far as my information and personal experience tells me (although you do say my information is wrong), consoles have incredibly low rates of piracy compared to PC gaming. I've been in the music industry for nearly a decade (indie by the way, not the RIAA or anything, before anyone gets their panties in a twist ) and I've seen the effects of piracy first-hand. There is no way that music piracy has caused sales to increase or stay level, the only direction they've traveled has been straight down. Luckily, in the past few years, efforts against piracy have caused sales to slowly rise again, but they're nowhere near what they were before the 'napster boom'. And the sheer extremes I can give in terms of anecdotal evidence tells me the biggest pirates are most certainly not the biggest spenders. I can't help but wonder if a lot of pirates argue that pirates are the biggest spenders so they can justify what they're doing. Well I disagree with you here. I don't believe swapping games with friends, or selling games second hand are acceptable market conditions. You can't sell or give to a friend your theater ticket after using it, why should that be allowed with games and movies?
You can't let your friend use your Big Mac after you crapped it out, either. What the hell is your point? Do you even know what you are arguing about? Whether you like it or not, console games and movies are distributed on physical media, allowing them to be swapped with friends. WHICH IS NOT ILLEGAL, BTW. Those are acceptable market conditions and I think it is ridiculous that you might argue otherwise. Your outlook on piracy is no better than the RIAA.
I'm aware this comes from a pro-filesharing blog, but: http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-the-music-industrys-most-valuable-customers-100122/ And from it: "Have you ever heard one of the major movie studios complaining about the decrease in sales of VHS tapes? We havent. The music industry on the other hand continues to blame the decrease in physical sales on digital piracy, ignoring the fact that theres a generation growing up that has never owned a physical CD." From what I've heard, the vast majority of profits with music comes from bands going on tour, and that any sort of easy-to-use digital distribution (letting people listen for free with MySpace Music, putting your album up on torrent sites, selling it through iTunes, whatever) will make your music more popular, and more people will come to your shows. Musicians, unless they're really really successful, normally don't make much from CD sales because the record companies take such a big cut. (although I must admit, I've never been in a band and don't really know this first-hand -- just what I've heard) Software (like video games) is a completely different market than music though. I think it makes sense to completely change the way music distribution works, and possibly even come up with new, better ways for musicians to get paid that doesn't include selling their music. It's a little harder though to make money off of software without selling it, as anyone who has worked on open source projects might know. I don't really know what the solution is for that, but I also don't think that piracy hurts the software industry nearly as much as people think. People who pirate iPhone apps download a lot more apps than they would otherwise because it doesn't cost them anything to do it. It in no way means that they would have bought all those apps if they weren't a pirate -- in fact they definitely wouldn't have, because all of them together would cost too much money. Also, I honestly think that if people didn't pirate copies of Windows left and right, Linux would have been the market dominator long ago. Windows is expensive, and so is Microsoft Office, and so is Adobe software, and I think pretty much the only reason why they enjoy majority market share is because half their userbase pirates their software. And this, in turn, makes more people rely on them. I would prefer people to buy my games rather than pirate them. But it's true, if people pirate them they're still my users, and more than likely they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
And what are sales figures like between consoles and PCs? I'd argue that, all else being equal, consoles likely sell about as many copies of a particular game as a comparable PC title, factoring in for the number of console owners versus PC owners. This makes no sense at all. People also sell used cars. Does that hurt the auto industry? Does the outdoor power equipment industry suffer if I lend a neighbour my lawnmower? Sure, they'd prefer these people buy instead of lend, and buy new instead of used, but piss on 'em if someone doesn't; it's not their place or right to tell anyone what to do with their products once money is exchanged for them. People who buy things can lend them out or sell them as they see fit because they own these things. In the case of DVDs, CDs or pieces of software, people own the physical media they are distributed on, and if they decide to sell it or let someone borrow it such that they are without it and can't use it concurrently with the person it's being lent or sold to, then that's their business, just the same as if you lend or sell someone your car, lawnmower, rake, a pair of socks, or a 5/16ths nut driver. I don't pay for the right to use my toaster. I pay to own the damn toaster. Comparing any of these things to a movie ticket is absurd. You pay to see a first-run movie once. You don't pay to play a game once, or listen to a CD once. Movies in theatres are more akin to a service than a product; it's like going to a concert or a play. There's no tangible, transferable product to do anything with -- though I could buy a ticket, decide I don't want to go and give or sell that ticket to someone else if I wanted to. That's my right, as long as I don't sell it for more than its face value.
One thing to note is that the App store removes most of the justifications people make for piracy. The two most common excuses I hear are "I'm a student etc, I can't afford $30-$50 games", and "The game isn't available in my area/completely out of print". I'll freely admit that I've recently pirated a few PS2 games, because they're obscure games which I've never seen available in Australia and that are out of print and therefore nearly impossible to find anywhere. The App Store removes both of these as excuses because the games are very cheap and available to all countries in most cases. You can't claim that a game is too expensive/hard to get when it's $5.00 and can be purchased, downloaded and played in under 5 minutes. I'd never pirate App Store games, partly because it's so easy for me to get them legitimately. Also the fact that devs are so supportive, I love how I can ask them questions about their game and they'll actually reply.
I agree with everything you said 100%. I think most people our age who went through platforms like the c64 which had absolutely rampant pirating, have the same mindset.
